CGCookie – Modeling Modular Game Assets

This course teaches how to build modular assets for lego-style building of a game level in Blender. It’s focused on both modeling and texturing of low-poly assets for exporting to Unity.
WHAT YOU’LL LEARN

Everything about asset creation for games is accomplished with resource efficiency in mind. This means using fewer polygons for models, overlapping UVs where able, and getting the most bang-for-our-buck out of our textures.

Modeling for modularity: These assets are sci-fi in genre and hard-surface in shape. Therefore the modeling approach is polygon modeling.
Efficient UV layout: To keep our assets as resource efficient as possible, we’re going to combine all our models’ UVs into one texture space. Also we’ll overlap UVs where possible to accomplish texture symmetry, as well as overlap UV’s of duplicate pieces of geometry so they all share the same texture info.
Texture Painting: Our textures are generated using an “evolutionary” approach where portions of maps are painted or baked with Blender and then layered together in Photoshop to create final versions. We will also be painting textures to take advantage of Unity’s PBR shading system.
Exporting & Importing: Portalethium is going to be built with Unity, so I’ll show you how to export our assets from Blender and import into Unity. I’ll also cover the workflow of updating our assets between the programs as we progress through the creation process.